In 2005, when the World Bank started to support the development of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector in rural Mongolia, less than 30 percent of the soum (district) center villages had reliable telecommunications, even though one-third of Mongolia’s population live in such small centers.

Access to telecommunications services has been extremely limited in the remote and sparsely populated areas of Mongolia. Several factors have conspired against achieving universal access on a purely commercial basis—the country’s vast and challenging geography, the nomadic lifestyle of the rural population, government ownership and incumbent control of the long-distance transmission network.